Por James Neilson

Saturday 16 February, 2019

Por Andrew Graham-Yooll

Saturday 16 February, 2019

Por Agustino Fontevecchia

Saturday 9 February, 2019

Por James Neilson

Néstor Kirchner, who before becoming president was
very much a man of the political right, once justified
his decision to ally himself with the leftist dominated human-rights organisations he and his wife had
cold-shouldered for years by pointing out that having them onside would shield him from criticism,
by giving him the equivalent of the legal privileges that help
crooked parliamentarians stay out of jail. To convince the “activists” and others of his sincerity, he showered them with money.

It was a smart move. While in recent years left-wing political
parties have been getting few and fewer votes in elections, the
movement they represent remains a powerful cultural force the
world over, one whose supporters are more than willing to pounce on anyone who fails to treat their shibboleths with what they
think is proper respect. As readers of even
conservative newspapers are aware, when a
journalist describes a politician as “right-wing,”
it means that he or she does not belong in civilised society and should be regarded with contempt. In contrast, “left-wing” ones, no matter
how uncouth they may be, are assumed to be
inspired by lofty ideals.

That is why not only the Kirchnerites, but
many others, among them the political heirs of
the late Hugo Chávez, continue to reap benefits
from the belief that, in their own peculiar way,
they are left-wingers and should therefore be treated with more indulgence by
the rest of the world than would otherwise be the case.

Luckily for Nicolás Maduro, despite his often brutal and
invariably ham-handed behaviour, many people who see
themselves as leftists feel obliged to treat him kindly. Some
have even rallied to support him in his hour of need by
telling us he is the victim of a cunning Donald Trumpinspired putsch. Others, such as the British Labour Party’s
formal leader Jeremy Corbyn, Uruguay’s President Tabaré Vázquez, his predecessor José ‘Pepe’ Mujica, Mexico’s
Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Pope Francis, have
declined to join the chorus demanding that he call it quits
and let Venezuelans decide between him and the “interim
president” Juan Guaidó.

Not that long ago, left-wing revolutionaries were fiercely
against the notion that national sovereignty meant that
outsiders had no right to interfere if a country’s internationally
recognised government started massacring people who objected
to its rule or made a habit of looting whatever its members could
get their fingers on. They thought that they at least should be
allowed to meddle in the internal affairs of every country on
earth and often did so with considerable enthusiasm. But times
have changed. Leftists now insist that Maduro’s regime has the
sovereign right to do whatever it likes in Venezuela and that attempts by the United States, Canada, Argentina, Brazil and other
Latin American countries, plus many in Europe, to dissuade him
should not be tolerated.

To justify the economic and diplomatic pressures they are
applying in an effort to make Maduro step down, Western governments argue that the regime is illegitimate because it is undemocratic and lacks public support. The principle thus evoked is
appealing, but much the same can be said about several dozen
dictatorships, among them China’s, which are fawned upon by
some of the people who have recently taken to demanding that
Venezuela hold fair and free elections.

Their willingness to make an exception of Venezuela can be
attributed partly to the belief that at long last the “Bolivarian”
regime – unlike Cuba’s or, needless to say, China’s – is now on its
last legs and could collapse at any moment, and partly to the
undeniable fact that it is making life increasingly difficult for
neighbouring countries by flooding them with refugees. Several
million have already fled and, unless something drastic happens
very soon, millions more could follow in their
footsteps. Though the scale of the exodus is
comparable with the one Europe faced a couple
of years back, its impact on the region has been
far smaller because there are few cultural differences between the Venezuelan migrants and
their hosts.

Left-wingers who think Maduro deserves
support are doing their best to blame his unhappy country’s plight on Yankee imperialism, not
on his attachment to a degenerate version, more
fascistic than socialist, of a creed that in recent
years has lost much of its once strong appeal,
though it appears to be making a comeback in
the US, of all places. It would surely make more sense for them
to dissociate themselves from a regime that has managed to
destroy a country boasting what are allegedly the world’s largest
oil reserves, turning much of it into an urban wasteland like something out of a dystopian Hollywood fantasy in which formerly
well-off professionals are reduced to scavenging for food in rubbish dumps, medical products cannot be found and stunted
children go hungry. But despite everything that has happened in
Venezuela, there are plenty of leftists who would much rather
watch Venezuelans starve than see them abandoning what
Chávez once called “21st century socialism.”

For such individuals, the political ideology they cling to matters
far more than the fate of mere people. That is why true-believers
in Communism, the more belligerent variants of fascism or Islamism are prone to react to failure with extreme violence; they all
take it for granted that if their schemes come to nothing, it must
be because their enemies are sabotaging them, not because they
simply could not be made to work.

There are still plenty of people who want to convince themselves that just about anything must be better than capitalism as we
know it and are willing to rally behind governments that say they
share their hopes. Perhaps there are far fewer such individuals
around than there were when some of the Western world’s most
prestigious intellectuals sung the praises of the mass-murderers
Stalin, Mao and Fidel Castro – but there are still enough of them
to give a little aid and comfort to such a farcical, but nonetheless
terribly harmful, representative of the breed as Maduro.